re: Victoria Jackson, I always hated her the most on SNL, and she was on during long stretches where nearly everyone on the cast was immensely hate-worthy.

Her path compared to Julia Sweeney's (another largely unfunny former cast member of SNL) is an interesting study. Julia used to be a devout Catholic, but after doing some soul-searching and really studying the Bible with a skeptical mind, found religion to be too much bullshit to subscribe to. Meanwhile, Victoria has continued down a delusional evangelical path that leads to ever-more-insane religiously-motivated thoughts. Like:

Thank you God above for giving us George W. Bush, and for giving us John McCain and Sarah Palin.

. In l99l she re-united with her high school sweetheart, married him, and moved to Florida where he's a police helicopter pilot. As a mother of two, homemaking is her priority now, but she's always available to perform ...if the price is right!

I wonder what made her feel that her past fame makes her compelling enough to campaign for McCain? Is it Dennis Miller's 'success' at punditry?

I'm not going to watch it, and I agree with that it is a bit on the overkill side of things.

That being said, I don't think it will hurt him. The people that are going to vote for him anyway will watch it, the people who won't vote for him will just whine about it. Not a big deal either way and it won't affect anything in the long run.

So far: Infomercial about various families around the US, highlighting financial problems surrounding retirement, foreclosures, crap big companies, healthcare, and education. The background music is a bit... annoying......

Yeah, the dramatic music's making me cringe. And agreed ScottS, this is probably going to be a non-factor. Except maybe as something the right will hold up as evidence of... something. Wasteful spending? I'm sure the price tag on this production is probably a bit hefty. I assume the target audience is the middle class undecideds, but I can't see this really grabbing them that strongly if they aren't already convinced.

I think it may be rather effective. The underlying vibe of the thing seems to be... well, trying to repeatedly get across that Obama is AMERICAN, is HALF WHITE, is NOT "PRO BLACK", is PRO FAMILY.... I get the sence that the whole idea behind this is less to get votes, but more to set the record straight so that perhaps the strange misnomers about his heritage and lifestyle can be dismissed. Perhaps it's more an attempt to curb the riotous reaction to having a BLACK MARXIST TERRORIST ISLAMIC president? I notice that they refer to him as "Barack", that he mentioned his only having known his father for a month's time at age 10...

It IS an infomercial, but... it has nothing negative whatsoever, and for that, I applaud him.

He's always good speaking live and working a crowd, so the half hour certainly finished strong, but this is nothing new or revelatory. Meh. It's like they had a shit ton of extra money laying around and figured fuck it, let's make an infomercial.

I thought it was effective - - remember the target audience isn't us... it's more geared toward the undecided voter, the misinformed, or low-information voters who hear the attack adds from McCain and trustingly think there MUST be SOMETHING behind the allegations... it's for those people (living in caves or somethin') who STILL say, "We don' know nothin' 'bout Obama, or where he stands, what he's a gonna do -- dunno if we can trust 'im". This is Obama giving a final push to introduce himself to the low-information voter (who didn't bother watching the convention -- and Obama made good use of some footage from the convention here), to show them he's not the scary boogie-man McCain and A.M. talk radio try to paint him, to show instead a good man, worthy of the following he's accumulated and more importantly, worthy of their votes.

I thought it had a strong "New Deal" vibe -- I liked that.

I'm waiting to hear McCain mocking Obama's eloquence and idealism. That's all the old man has left, his cynicism and bile.

"it's more geared toward the undecided voter, the misinformed, or low-information voters who hear the attack adds from McCain and trustingly think there MUST be SOMETHING behind the allegations... it's for those people (living in caves or somethin') who STILL say, "We don' know nothin' 'bout Obama, or where he stands, what he's a gonna do -- dunno if we can trust 'im"."

Yeah... I imagine that's the case... but I guess what I'm wondering is, would those people actually watch this when there are tons of other things on TV...?